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  • Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

    Ruha Benjamin

    $19.95

    From the author of Race After Technology, an inspiring vision of how we can build a more just world—one small change at a time

    “A true gift to our movements for justice.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

    Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

    Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father’s premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother’s experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well.

    Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

  • Autistic and Black

    Kala Allen Omeiza

    $19.95

    "It's time we bring forward Black autistic pain points and celebrate the triumphs of ourselves, family members, and organizations that care for these individuals. Through following the real stories of others from around the world, I hope fellow Black and autistic individuals will be empowered to realize that being Black and autistic is enough."

    In this powerful insight into the lives of Black autistic people, Kala Allen Omeiza brings together a community of voices from across the world, spanning religions, sexuality and social economic status to provide a deep and rich understanding of what it means to be autistic and Black.

    Exploring everything from self-love and appreciation, to the harsh realities of police brutality, anti-Black racism, and barriers to care, as well as amplifying the voices of the inspiring advocates who actively work towards change, protection, and acceptance for themselves and others, this book is an empowering force, reminding you that as a Black autistic person, you are enough.

  • Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930–1990: A Change Did Come (Volume 102) (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University)

    Dwight D. Watson

    $44.00

    In Houston, as in the rest of the American South up until the 1950s, the police force reflected and enforced the segregation of the larger society. When the nation began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, this guardian of the status quo had to change, too. It was not designed to do so easily.

    Dwight Watson traces how the Houston Police Department reacted to social, political, and institutional change over a fifty-year period—and specifically, how it responded to and in turn influenced racial change.

    Using police records as well as contemporary accounts, Watson astutely analyzes the escalating strains between the police and segments of the city’s black population in the 1967 police riot at Texas Southern University and the 1971 violence that became known as the Dowling Street Shoot-Out. The police reacted to these events and to daily challenges by hardening its resolve to impose its will on the minority community.

    By 1977, the events surrounding the beating and drowning of Jose Campos Torres while in police custody prompted one writer to label the HPD the “meanest police in America.” This event encouraged Houston’s growing Mexican American community to unite with blacks in seeking to curb police autonomy and brutality.

    Watson’s study demonstrates vividly how race complicated the internal impulses for change and gave way through time to external pressures—including the Civil Rights Movement, modernization, annexations, and court-ordered redistricting—for institutional changes within the department. His work illuminates not only the role of a southern police department in racial change but also the internal dynamics of change in an organization designed to protect the status quo.

  • Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas (Volume 7) (Texas Local Series)

    George Keaton Jr.

    $21.95

    Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas enlarges upon two publications by the late Dr. Mamie McKnight’s organization, Black Dallas Remembered—First African American Families of Dallas (1987) and African American Families and Settlements of Dallas (1990). Our Stories is the history of Black citizens of Dallas going about their lives in freedom, as described by the late Eva Partee McMillan: “The ex-slaves purchased land, built homes, raised their children, erected their educational and religious facilities, educated their children, and profited from their labor.”

    Our Stories brings together memoirs from many of Dallas’s earliest Black families, as handed down over the generations to their twentieth-century descendants. The period covered begins in the 1850s and goes through the 1930s. Included are detailed descriptions of more than thirty early Dallas communities formed by free African Americans, along with the histories of fifty-seven early Black families, and brief biographies of many of the early leaders of these Black communities.

    The stories reveal hardships endured and struggles overcome, but the storytellers focus on the triumphs over adversity and the successes achieved against the odds. The histories include the founding of churches, schools, newspapers, hospitals, grocery stores, businesses, and other institutions established to nourish and enrich the lives of the earliest Black families in Dallas.

  • PRE-ORDER: Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation

    Carolyn Ureña

    $29.95

    PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: March 20, 2025

    Decolonizing Bodies offers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of racialized and colonized populations, profoundly constraining their being in the world. The book invigorates embodiment studies by centering the experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, colonized, disabled, queer, and racialized subjects, showing how they live these displacements and disintegrations.

    The volume powerfully demonstrates how racism and colonialism sediment in bodily and habitual registers that are active, ongoing, made and remade. Bodies, the contributors argue, powerfully register the impacts of colonial and racialized violence, but through practices of embodiment, they also digest, expel, and transform them. In centering non-normative subjective experiences and making space for different kinds of embodied knowledge, Decolonizing Bodies also takes a step toward decolonizing academic knowledge.

    This exciting and urgent book offers readers new ways of imagining, choreographing and enacting the body. Beyond connecting distant geographies of harm, it celebrates polymorphous decolonial repertoires that record, creatively narrate, and heal.

  • Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman

    N. S. Nuseibeh

    Sold out

    A Palestinian Woman's dazzling exploration of heritage, gender and the idea of home.

    I may not be brave enough, but somewhere deep inside of me there is, perhaps, the kernel of someone who is.

    That brave someone was the legendary Nusayba bint Ka’ab al Khazrajia, who fought alongside the Prophet Muhammad at the dawn of Islam, the author N.S Nuseibeh’s ancestor. In drawing on Nusayba’s stories, Nuseibeh delves into the experience of being an Arab woman today and in the distant past—taking her from superheroes and the glorification of violence to the rise of Arab feminism, to what courage looks like in the context of interminable conflict. By seeking to understand her namesake in the context of her own twenty-first century concerns, Nuseibeh links our current ideas of Muslims and Arabs with their origins, exploring myth-making and identity, religion and nationhood, feminism and race.

    As intimate as they are thoughtful, these linked essays offer a dazzling exploration of heritage, gender and the idea of home, while also showing how connecting with our history can help us understand ourselves and others today.

  • I Am Maroon : The True Story of an American Political Prisoner

    Russell Shoatz

    $32.50
    In this cinematic memoir, follow one man's journey from gang member to Black liberation leader to political prisoner–and the justice and redemption he fought for along the way.

    Inspired by Malcolm X, Russell Shoatz became a lifelong crusader for justice, a soldier in the most militant units of the Black Liberation Army. Shoatz was convicted to life in prison following a coordinated attack on a park police station that left one guard dead.The prison walls, however, could not deter Shoatz’s battle for personal and collective freedom. He escaped state prisons twice, making him a living legend, and endowed him with the moniker “Maroon,” once used to honor runaway slaves from plantations. He survived 22 years in solitary confinement, prompting an international campaign for his freedom.

    I Am Maroon charts a life of dizzying intrigue and a long struggle for liberation. With an unforgettable voice, Maroon reminds us that we too are capable of radical change, leaving us a blueprint for how we might dedicate our lives and minds to the ongoing fight for freedom.    
    Contributor Bio(s)

    Russell "Maroon" Shoatz was a dedicated community activist, founding member of the Black Unity Council, former member of the Black Panther Party, and soldier in the Black Liberation Army.

     Kanya D'Almeida is a writer and winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. As a journalist, she reported for a decade on global economic apartheid, reproductive justice and prison abolition.
  • Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America

    by Joel Edward Goza

    $34.99

    Like many well-intentioned white people, Goza once believed that he could support Black America’s struggle for equality without supporting reparations. Reparations, he thought, were altogether irrelevant to the real work of racial justice. 
     
    This is a book about why he was wrong. In fact, any effort to heal our nation’s wounds will fail without reparations. 
     
    In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza exposes lesser-known aspects of racism in American history and how Black people have consistently been depicted as responsible for their own oppression to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and gross inequality. Goza’s iconoclastic and incisive account exposes how revered figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln embedded white supremacy deep into our nation’s consciousness—and how Ronald Reagan manipulated this ideology so that society cheered as he advanced a set of policies that wounded our nation and intensified Black America’s suffering. 

    But Rebirth of a Nation is not merely about accountability. It is also about hope. A reparations process is not a utopian dream; Goza offers a practical path toward closing the racial wealth gap. Rebirth of a Nation shows readers how they can join the reparative process, working toward the creation of a more perfect union.

  • How to Abolish Prisons : Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment

    by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché

    Sold out

    An incisive guide to abolitionist strategy, and a love letter to the movement that made this moment possible.

    Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in
     How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.

    Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.

    Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities.Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion.

  • Bright Red Fruit

    by Safia Elhillo

    $19.99

    An unflinching, honest novel in verse about a teenager's journey into the slam poetry scene and the dangerous new relationship that could threaten all her dreams. From the award-winning poet and author of HOME IS NOT A COUNTRY. Bad girl. No matter how hard Samira tries, she can’t shake her reputation. She’s never gotten the benefit of the doubt—not from her mother or the aunties who watch her like a hawk. Samira is determined to have a perfect summer filled with fun parties, exploring DC, and growing as a poet—until a scandalous rumor has her grounded and unable to leave her house. When Samira turns to a poetry forum for solace, she catches the eye of an older, charismatic poet named Horus. For the first time, Samira feels wanted. But soon she’s keeping a bigger secret than ever before—one that that could prove her reputation and jeopardize her place in her community. In this gripping coming-of-age novel from the critically acclaimed author Safia Elhillo, a young woman searches to find the balance between honoring her family, her artistry, and her authentic self.

  • Imagination: A Manifesto

    by Ruha Benjamin

    from $12.00

    In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.

    A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

    Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination.

    The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

    Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”

  • Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

    by Angela Y. Davis

    $15.95
    Activist, teacher, author and icon of the Black Power movement Angela Davis talks Ferguson, Palestine, and prison abolition.

    In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

    Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.

    Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."
  • Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care

    by Ethel Tungohan

    Sold out

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society’s legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary.

  • Gone Wolf

    by Amber McBride

    $17.99

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    In her first middle-grade novel, award-winning author Amber McBride explores Black pain, trauma, and ultimately, healing through the story of what might happen if white supremacists ceded from the rest of the country.

    In the future, a Black girl known only as Inmate Eleven is kept confined—to be used as a biological match for the president's son, should he fall ill. She is called a Blue—the color of sadness. She lives in a small-small room with her dog, who is going wolf more often—he’s pacing and imagining he’s free. Inmate Eleven wants to go wolf too—she wants to know why she feels so blue and what is beyond her small-small room.

    In the present, Imogen lives outside of Washington DC. The pandemic has distanced her from everyone but her mother and her therapist. Imogen has intense phobias and nightmares of confinement. Her two older brothers used to help her

  • Micro Activism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World without a Bullhorn

    by Omkari L. Williams

    $17.99

    Everyone can be an activist with the guidance of Omkari Williams, a life coach who guides readers in identifying their "activist archetype" and mapping a personal action plan for engaging in small, change-making activities with potentially big impacts.

    In this age of social justice, those who don't necessarily want to lead a movement or join a protest march are left wondering, "How can I make an impact?" In Micro Activism, former political consultant turned activism coach Omkari Williams shares her expertise in empowering introverts and highly sensitive people to help each of us, no matter our temperament, find our most satisfying and effective activist role. Using Williams's Activist Archetype tool, readers discover their unique strengths and use this to develop a personal strategy. To ensure sustainable involvement, Williams encourages starting small, working collaboratively, and beginning locally. Advice on self-care practices, burn-out prevention, and profiles of activists engaged in a range of activities and causes (from voter registration to craftivism, literacy programs, community gardens, and more), provide readers with the inspiration and practical know-how needed to engage in small, doable actions that make a lasting impact. 
  • It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How to Move On

    by Malaika Jabali

    $24.00

    A biting, brilliant, often hilarious guide to socialism for budding anti-capitalists who know it’s time to dump their toxic ex (Capitalism) and try something finer. Journalist Malaika Jabali debunks myths, centers forgotten socialists of color who have shaped our world, and shows socialism is not all Marx and Bernie Bros—it can be pretty sexy.

    We’ve all dated someone who took control of the relationship—you know, someone who makes you feel like you’re unhappy because you’re just not putting in the work, or it’s all in your head. But when you think about trying to meet new people, it feels terrifying. Like, have you looked at Tinder recently? It’s rough out there!

    Your tough-love new best friend, award-winning journalist, policy attorney, and life-long socialist Malaika Jabali is here to say: we are all in a generations-long toxic relationship with Capitalism, and it is time to get the h*ll out of there and move ALONG.

    She gives you everything you need to know about what a healthy relationship could actually look like, issue by issue—from healthcare and housing to the whole concept of American democracy—with our new boo: Socialism. And no, Socialism isn’t the boring, grey, authoritarian, Cold-War-era monster that you’ve heard about. 

    With accessible explanations and illustrations, often surprising graphs and stats, and some Drake memes, this book will show you that we NEED to build a world that’s safer, kinder, cleaner, healthier, and more equal. And that this isn’t a utopian dream – it’s within our grasp, if we collectively decide to call out Capitalism for what it really is and wake up to a better future.
     
    Fun, smart, and inspiring, It’s Not You It’s Capitalism is the hottest new relationship in your life!

  • The Anti-Racist Vocab Guide: An Illustrated Introduction to Dismantling Anti-Blackness

    by Maya Ealey

    $18.95

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    From "Assimilation" to "Decolonization," "Black Wall Street" to "Police Brutality," and "Colorism" to "White Supremacy," this book equips you with the language to engage in crucial conversations around anti-Black racism.

    The Anti-Racist Vocab Guide is a boldly illustrated visual glossary that distills complex subjects into comprehensive yet accessible definitions of terms and provides concise and insightful explanations of historical moments. With reflection questions to use for introspection or as a starting point for hard conversations with those close to you, this book will encourage both your learning and unlearning—no matter where you are in your journey to understanding race in America.

    THOROUGH AND APPROACHABLE: This book presents huge topics in easy-to-understand language that welcomes readers of every experience.

    REFLECTION QUESTIONS: Each entry is followed by questions to encourage readers to continue their education and translate their new understanding into positive action in their daily lives.

    BEYOND THE BUZZWORDS: This is an invaluable resource guide that breaks down and goes beyond common phrases to provide actionable awareness.

    EVOCATIVE ART: Author Maya Ealey's striking art provides conceptual illustrations of each term explained in the book in her bold, passionate style.

    Perfect for:

    • Anyone interested in learning more about race in America
    • People who want help understanding the complicated subject of racism
    • Parents, teachers, and students
    • Readers of instructive and informative best sellers such as How to Be an Antiracist, White Fragility, The 1619 Project, and Do the Work!: An Antiracist Activity Book
  • Put Y'all Back in Chains: How Joe Biden's Policies Hurt Black Americans

    by Horace Cooper

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    *ships in 7 - 10 business days*

    Put Y’all Back in Chains outlines how the policies of President Joe Biden harm Black communities and limit opportunities for their success.

    “Whether you agree or disagree, Horace Cooper’s latest book tackles the question of how Joe Biden’s policies affect Americans, especially those in minority and underserved communities. His research shows that the injuries are calamitous. Instead of a rising tide lifting all boats, the Biden policies are having a reverse effect, one that devastates bank accounts, crushes entrepreneurship, and steals the promise of the American Dream.

    Horace painstakingly combs through the harsh results of these efforts, especially on lower income and working class people, who are hit hardest by the woke-policies of Joe Biden. If you want to see the real story the media isn’t telling, this book is a must read!”

    –Sean Hannity, Fox News Host

    A thorough examination of the ways that the policies of President Joe Biden are antithetical to the aspirations and dreams of Blacks, Put Y’all Back in Chains uncovers the reasons that the policies of the Biden Administration hurt Black communities in particular. And this is no accident.

    Progressive policymakers relished Biden’s COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, his experiments with higher unemployment benefits and related regulatory programs, and especially his push for the green agenda. Consequently, working-class people, especially Black men, were hardest hit when it comes to finding employment as well as maintaining their financial lifestyle. Tragically, the Biden Agenda hurt the entire Black community, affecting educational attainment, wealth creation, and homeownership.

    These dramatic downward changes were particularly hard to absorb for Black households, especially those that made tremendous gains during the Trump Administration.

    It is increasingly clear that President Joe Biden’s priorities place Blacks at the back of the political bus. 

    In this thoroughly researched book, Horace Cooper outlines how the minority group most likely to support Biden—Blacks—are systematically impaired by this White House and why the Black community needs to turn away from the Biden Administration and toward a brighter future.

  • Toward Liberation: Educational Practices Rooted in Activism, Healing and Love

    by Jamilah Pitts

    $21.95

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    An essential guide for frontline educators to address systemic racial oppression, repair harm, and foster safe, inclusive learning spaces for their students

    For educators and readers of Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive, with a foreword by Leigh Patel, author of No Study Without Struggle


    Toward Liberation is the timely and practical guide that pioneers new pathways for educators to repair harm and foster transformative learning spaces. This road map for liberatory pedagogy is replete with resources, tools, and strategies drawn from Jamilah Pitts's experiences as a young Black girl, a Black student, a teacher, a former school leader, and a consultant with schools across the country.

    Educators will want to mark up and keep their copy of Toward Liberation at their desks for easy reference. In its pages, they will find

    • Real-life examples and student writing from Pitts’s classroom
    • Explorative questions for teachers to consider in their equity work
    • Constructive charts that map out manifestations of harm
    • Activities to engage students in liberatory learning
    • Healing and self-care strategies for teachers—particularly Black women educators


    Pitts infuses her writing with an extensive knowledge base of the education system, honed over years as a teacher, a coach, a dean, an assistant principal, and a national education consultant. The tenets of this book—rooted in truthtelling, activism, healing, wellness, self-care, and, ultimately, love— both inform and are inspired by the healing work Pitts does with educators to this day. In doing this work, she helps to reimagine the role of the critical teacher.

    Toward Liberation equips teachers with the tools they need to carve a path toward liberatory educational practices, ensuring that students are afforded the full range of their humanity and their experience, in and out of the classroom.

  • Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies

    edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    $19.95
    "The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." —Colin Kaepernick

    Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.

    Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others.

    Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back.

    To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all—through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.
  • Ideas in Unexpected Places : Reimagining Black Intellectual History

    by Leslie M. Alexander, Brandon R. Byrd & Russell Rickford

    $34.95
    This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history.
     
    The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.
     
    Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses—and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.
  • Let This Radicalize You : Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

    by Mariame Kaba

    Sold out

    What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

    Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

    The book is intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

  • All the Black Girls Are Activists: A Fourth Wave Womanist Pursuit of Dreams as Radical Resistance

    by Ebony Janice Moore

    $16.99

    “Who would black women get to be if we did not have to create from a place of resistance?”

    Hip Hop Womanist writer and theologian EbonyJanice’s book of essays center a fourth wave of Womanism, dreaming, the pursuit of softness, ancestral reverence, and radical wholeness as tools of liberation. 

    All The Black Girls Are Activists is a love letter to Black girls and Black women, asking and attempting to offer some answers to “Who would black women get to be if we did not have to create from a place of resistance?” by naming Black women’s wellness, wholeness, and survival as the radical revolution we have been waiting for.

    About the Author: EbonyJanice is a dynamic lecturer, transformational speaker, passionate multi-faith preacher, and creative focused on Decolonizing Authority, Hip Hop Scholarship, Womanism as a Political and Spiritual/Religious tool for Liberation, Blackness as Religion, Dialogue as central to professional development and personal growth, and Women and Gender Studies focused on black girlhood.

    EbonyJanice holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Political Science and a Master of Arts in Social Change with a concentration in Spiritual Leadership, Womanist Theology, and Racial Justice. She is the founder of Black Girl Mixtape, a multi-platform safe think-space centering the intellectual and creative authority of black women in the form of a lecture series, an online learning institute, and a creative collaborative.

    EbonyJanice is also the founder of Dream Yourself Free, a Spiritual Mentoring project focused on black women's healing, dreaming, ease, play, and wholeness as their activism and resistance work.

  • We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love
    $16.00
    Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.

    Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

    To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.
  • How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance

    by Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin

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    This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice -- and ideas for how each of us can contribute

    Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.

    Featuring contributions from:

    • Ta-Nehisi Coates
    • Tarana Burke
    • Harry Belafonte
    • Adrienne Maree brown
    • Alicia Garza
    • Patrisse Khan-Cullors
    • Reverend Dr. Valerie Bridgeman
    • Kiese Laymon
    • Jamilah Lemieux
    • Robin DG Kelley
    • Damon Young
    • Michael Arceneaux
    • Hanif Abdurraqib
    • Dr. Yaba Blay
    • Diamond Stingily
    • Amanda Seales
    • Imani Perry
    • Denene Millner
    • Kierna Mayo
    • John Jennings
    • Dr. Joy Harden Bradford
    • Tongo Eisen-Martin
  • Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies

    by Andrea Ritchie & Alexis Pauline Gumbs

    $22.00

    An exploration of how emergent strategies can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures.

    Practicing New Worlds
     explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.

    Drawing on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate, and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree brown in 
    Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism—and the cataclysms to come. Rooted in analysis of current abolitionist practices and interviews with on-the-ground organizers resisting state violence, building networks to support people in need of abortion care, and nurturing organizations and convergences that can grow transformative cities and movements, Practicing New Worlds takes readers on a journey of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being. 

  • Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation

    by adrienne maree brown

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    Life skills for liberation.

    In our complex world, facilitation and mediation skills are as important for individuals as they are for organizations. How do we practice them in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imagining of our future? How do we attend to generating the ease necessary to help us move through the inevitable struggles of life? How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves? Black feminists have answers to those questions that can serve anyone working to create changes in our world, changes great and small; individually, interpersonally, and within our organizations.

    Holding Change is about attending to coordination, to conflict, to being humans in right relationship with each other, not as a constant ongoing state, but rather as a magnificent, mysterious, ever-evolving dynamic in which we must involve ourselves, shape ourselves and each other. The majority of the book is sourced from brown’s twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work with movement groups.

    Includes contributions by Autumn Brown, Sage Crump, Malkia Devich-Cyril, Ejeris Dixon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Micky ScottBey Jones, N’Tanya Lee, and Makani Themba

  • Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice

    by Accra Shepp

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    Radical Justice brings together two bodies of socially-engaged photographic portraiture by Accra Shepp, who has documented New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020.  

    Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular.  Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.

  • Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

    by Cara Page & Erica Woodland

    $17.95

    A profound offering and call to action—collective stories, testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer and Trans healing justice lineages

    We reclaim the power, resilience, and innovation of our ancestors through this book. To embody their wisdom across centuries and generations is to continue their legacy of liberation and healing.

    In this anthology, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice—a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next.

    Anti-capitalist, Black feminist, and abolitionist, Healing Justice Lineages is a profound and urgent call to embrace community and survivor-led care strategies as models that push beyond commodified self-care, the policing of the medical industrial complex, and the surveillance of the public health system. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, this collection elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation and survival—one that has been largely left out of our history books, but continues to this day.

    In the first section, “Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage,” Page and Woodland remember and reclaim generations-long healing justice and community care work, asking critical questions like: How did our ancestors transform trauma and violence in their liberation work? What were our ancestors reckoning with—and what did they imagine?

    The next sections, “Origins of Healing Justice” and “Alchemy: Theory + Praxis,” explore regional stories of healing justice in response to the current political and cultural landscape. The last section, “Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future,” imagines a future rooted in lessons of the past; addresses the ways healing justice is being co-opted and commodified; and uplifts emergent work that’s building infrastructure for care, safety, healing, and political liberation.

  • My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement

    by Willie Mae Brown

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    A stirring memoir of growing up Black in a town at the epicenter of the fight for freedom, equality, and human rights.

    Combining family stories of the everyday and the extraordinary as seen through the eyes of her twelve-year-old self, Willie Mae Brown gives readers an unforgettable portrayal of her coming-of-age in a fractured town at the crossroads of history. Selma's pivotal role in the civil rights movement forms an inescapable backdrop in this collection of stories. In one, Willie Mae takes it upon herself to offer summer babysitting services to a glamorous single white mother—a secret she keeps from her father that unravels with shocking results. In another, Willie Mae reluctantly joins her mother at a church rally, and is forever changed after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a defiant speech. My Selma! captures the voice and vision of a perspicacious, impetuous, resourceful young person who gives us a loving portrayal of her hometown while also delivering a no-holds-barred indictment of the time and place.

  • Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist's Freedom Song

    by Marlon Peterson

    $18.99

    *ships in 7-10 business days

    From a leading prison abolitionist, a moving memoir about coming of age in Brooklyn and surviving incarceration—and a call to break free from all the cages that confine us.
     
    Marlon Peterson grew up in 1980s Crown Heights, raised by Trinidadian immigrants. Amid the routine violence that shaped his neighborhood, Marlon became a high-achieving and devout child, the specter of the American dream opening up before him. But in the aftermath of immense trauma, he participated in a robbery that resulted in two murders. At nineteen, Peterson was charged and later convicted. He served ten long years in prison. While incarcerated, Peterson immersed himself in anti-violence activism, education, and prison abolition work.
     
    In Bird Uncaged, Peterson challenges the typical “redemption” narrative and our assumptions about justice. With vulnerability and insight, he uncovers the many cages—from the daily violence and trauma of poverty, to policing, to enforced masculinity, and the brutality of incarceration—created and maintained by American society.

    Bird Uncaged is a twenty-first-century abolitionist memoir, and a powerful debut that demands a shift from punishment to healing, an end to prisons, and a new vision of justice.

  • Comrade Sisters

    by Stephen Shames

    $45.00
    Foreword by Angela Davis: “This stunning collection of historical photographs, complimented by contemporary conversations with women members of the Black Panther Party, reminds us that women were literally the heart of this new political approach to Black freedom.”Many of us have heard these three words: Black Panther Party. Some know the Party's history as a movement for the social, political, economic and spiritual upliftment of Black and indigenous people of color – but to this day, few know the story of the backbone of the Party: the women. It's estimated that six out of ten Panther Party members were women. While these remarkable women of all ages and diverse backgrounds were regularly making headlines agitating, protesting, and organizing, off-stage these same women were building communities and enacting social justice, providing food, housing, education, healthcare, and more. Comrade Sisters is their story.The book combines photos by Stephen Shames, who at the time was a 20-year-old college student at Berkeley. With the complete trust of the Black Panther Party, Shames took intimate, behind-the-scenes photographs that fully portrayed Party members' lives. This marks his third photo book about the Black Panthers and includes many never before published images.Ericka Huggins, an early Party member and leader along with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, has written a moving text, sharing what drew so many women to the Party and focusing on their monumental work on behalf of the most vulnerable citizens. Most importantly, the book includes contributions from over fifty former women members – some well-known, others not – who vividly recall their personal experiences from that time. Other texts include a foreword by Angela Davis and an afterword by Alicia Garza. All Power to the People.We are very excited to share with you a preview of what's to come!

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